The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is on the move again, filing lawsuites against 717 people for sharing music.
This time, the number of university students targeted is nearly three times the number sued in recent rounds, says the Big Music cartel’s RIAA, going on, “college and university students continue to be among the most frequent users of illegal peer-to-peer sites for obtaining music”.
Sixty-eight people at 23 universities and colleges are under the RIAA’s guns.
The RIAA sues the dead! In this article, Andrew Orlowski states an interesting observation, or is it a predition? You can't be too young to face the consequences of being social, it seems. Only the unborn, it seems, have yet to receive an infringement suit.
Subpoenas can no longer be issued to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for names of alleged infringers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).
The Judge Rules
Eighth Circuit Judge Kermit Bye wrote that subpoenas apply only to material stored on ISP servers, according to language in the DMCA. "As a court we are bound to interpret the terms of the statute and not to contort the statute so as to cover the situation presented by this case," he wrote.
The Eighth Circuit ordered the RIAA to return any information it obtained from Charter Communications using the subpoenas and to destroy any records of the information.
While these articles apply to individuals sharing MP3 files, companies are vulnerable for fines if enforcement agencies find MP3 files on company computers, copiers, and anything with a memory. Will the RIAA raid companies one of these days?
